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It was night, but it was steadily becoming lighter, and had been for some time. The statue of the Bombinating Beast was still inside my coat, shivering in and out like a question mark or the eyebrows of a woman I was very fond of and missed very much. I was shivering too, not just because of the dead birds around me, all skulls and crossbones, or the temperature, which was colder than I would have preferred, but simply the lack of food. I hadn’t eaten in hours, not since the derailing of a train, or maybe a little before, and my hands were shaking.
The figure walking beside me was shaking too, shaking like the statue and myself, which is to say he probably wasn’t shaking at all, and I was mistaking my vibrations for his. He was walking steadily onwards, as relaxed as I had seen him when I met him, and the opposite of how I’d seen him last. I had already asked four wrong questions, and maybe even more than that, but I still had it in me for a few more.
“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?” I asked him.
He sighed and something dripped to the ground, leaving a stain. He’d been following me as I walked along the train tracks, staring into the forest I had ordered the Bombinating Beast to, and as I followed the small path inside, one too worn down to have been made by two small humans or one large monster. He’d been following me ever since his death a few hours ago in the metaphorical sense, and now he was following me in the literal sense.
“That’s the wrong question, Snicket,” said the ghost of Dashiell Qwerty. “You’ve just undergone something traumatic. This is your mind coping.” He floated overhead, hands in pockets. His throat still dripped. I tried my best to look away. “Or perhaps ghosts are indeed real, and I’m haunting you. I’m afraid that, without my books, I have no answer that could help you.”
“But why would you be haunting me for any reason other than my guilt?” I dodged around a piece of weaving seaweed. “Your death could have been prevented.”
“A whole lot of this mess could have been prevented if you’d listened to my advice. You feel guilty about my death?”
“Yes, of course.” I dodged another. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You don’t seem to be guilty about the murder of Armstrong Feint.”
I sighed. This was not a conversation I wanted to have. His eyes flicked over me from behind his sunglasses, and there was something off about the color of them. I had only clearly seen his eyes once, when things had become a matter of handcuffs. Perhaps he really was a hallucination, and this was the result of my poor memory. Or perhaps this was a result of some spectral influence. I was dodging the question and dodging the seaweed. I spoke. “He was a villain.”
“Everyone’s a villain to someone, Snicket, and two wrongs don’t make a right. What on Earth is this organization coming to…” He stared off into the sky and came back down, feet resting on the ground to continue walking next to me. “Children, as young as yourself, shouldn’t have to deal with this schism. It’s only going to get worse. I don’t know if you were alive when it happened. From the look of things, you must have been very young when it did, or not alive at all. I was a young teenager when it started.” He sighed and shook his head. The sky didn’t go anywhere. “Those books you asked for, those secret messages… I hope they reached whoever you sent them to.”
“I hope that too”, I said, and continued on. My vision was beginning to blur again. This time, Qwerty blurred with it, the red around his neck becoming a massive spot around his head. He clicked his tongue in a way that was more concern than condescension.
“You’re dehydrated, Snicket. You should have had something to drink on the train.”
I was not sure if he understood the underlying meaning to his words, but if he truly was just a figment of my imagination, he certainly did. “I should have done a lot of things,” I said, and laid down on the path I was on, looking up at the sky. My hat did nothing for me from this angle, and so I took it off, letting my horrible haircut free. Qwerty looked down at me, his own hair, which someone probably found atrocious, moving slightly. I wanted to cry out of frustration. I laughed instead, rolling around on the ground. This was a lawless land. I could be as lawless as I wanted.
After a few minutes, the clouds around my vision cleared up and I stood, continuing on. Qwerty moved behind me, like a noisy shadow. Every so often he would attempt to bring up conversation, and I would answer him briefly. I wanted to keep my mouth as wet as possible. I didn’t want to talk to him. I should have talked to him more when he was alive, and now he was dead. What good could it do?
After what felt like several hours and several minutes all at once, I heard a whooshing noise. It was different from the rustling of the seaweed or the hissing of the Bombinating Beast or the pulsing of my own blood in my ears. I paused and heard it again. I began to sprint across the path, half delirious and three-quarters unsteady, nearly tripping over myself as I screeched to halt.
There was a road, not a footpath like the one I had been walking across, but a genuine road, one like the long ones that lead back to the city. I was finally out of the forest, and I hoped I was out of the woods. I wiped the sweat from my brow and carefully walked down the steep way down towards the road, hoping to keep my vision clear and my feet steady. It worked, and my feet found purchase on non-forested ground. I turned behind me to look back at the forest.
Qwerty did not step past the invisible boundary separating us. It was as if he was some cursed being in a children’s book, one fated to never leave a place of horror. Ghosts often can’t leave the place they died, I thought. He looked like a ghost, one of many that was going to follow me for a long, long time. He gave me a look of worry and it made my empty stomach toss. I knew what he was going to say before he said it. I had known a future sub-sub-librarian before I knew Qwerty. Even with the distance, my blurring vision, and his sunglasses, the desperation in his eyes was apparent.
“You’re going to have to tell Dewey what happened to me.”
I nodded. “I will.”
He nodded back. There was nothing else to do but nod. I turned and walked towards the road. I did not look behind me. I stuck out my thumb, as is customary for hitchhikers and people a long way from home seeking a way back. I did not need to. There was a taxi stopped just a few feet away, engine still on. I got in. The man behind the wheel was unfamiliar to me, and yet I had a sense that I knew him, somehow.
I knew the other people inside the vehicle for certain. Two of my fellow classmates from the same unorthodox education were inside. One looked shocked, and the other, mildly amused. One of them was holding a small box, and the other, research papers. I nodded as I scooted inside and one of them nodded at me. The taxi driver nodded as well and the car took off.
I looked up at the sky beyond the Clusterous Forest. The window seat offered a lovely view of the smoke from the turned-over train still rising into the air. I could have been in those woods for thirty minutes or two hours. Qwerty was still standing there, in the bottom of my peripherals, watching the taxi go. I had never seen him outside Stain'd-by-the-Sea, and now I never would. I looked back at the taxi driver, and then at my associates, who had been watching the sky as well. Smoke was never a good sign. Fire often followed it. The associate closest to me, physically and emotionally, met my eyes, and so I spoke.
“Beatrice.”